Reviews and recaps of children's and YA historical fiction from the 80s, 90s, and 2000s

Boys

I had so many mixed feelings about this book. I read it when it first came out, when I got a quarter of the way through and thought “What the hell,” and now I read the whole thing and thought “WHAT THE FUCK?” This book is for young people. Good Lord.

Shot at Dawn: World War I, Allan McBride, France, 1917, John Wilson, 2011.

For starters: I think it was a particularly brave decision by Scholastic for their very first book in a series that they would hoping be a popular spinoff to a popular series to be about a deserter being faced with execution. I mean, really. John Wilson is a great author who’s done a great job with it, so no qualms there (he also wrote Graves of Ice later in the series, which was also great), but this is pretty intense for what is ultimately a book targeted at YOUNG PEOPLE.

The structure of this book is also a bit different from some of the others—it starts out with a prologue where Allan is being held overnight in preparation for his execution the following morning, and telling his story to the officer guarding him will form the bulk of his story. I also don’t know for sure but I’d like to think that the choice of McBride is an allusion to The Green Fields of France, which if you haven’t listened to it (you should) refers to a young man by the name of Willie McBride. Anyway, that has nothing to do with anything, but I enjoyed it.

I think the entire reason I had no idea what was coming was because the back cover blurb on this book is terrible. Just terrible! Our fearless hero Sam has his plane shot down, and in his effort to get back to England he works with the French Resistance. It does not go well to say the absolute least.

The other thing that’s strange about this series is that some of them are more diary-style (numbered entries, text like “I don’t know what to write” or things like that) and some of them, like this one, are just straight first-person recounting that happen to have a date at the beginning of the chapter to orient the reader. Neither one is better, it’s just a little bit odd for me, the reader. (Or possibly it doesn’t bother normal people and it just bothers me, the reader reading these things for detail and comparing and contrasting them to other books in the same and sibling series.)

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I don’t know how I feel about this book. Hugh Brewster is an excellent writer, but the choice of material is slightly odd. Why are there two I Am Canada books that deal with Canadian soldiers being captured as POWs—this one, and Behind Enemy Lines? And yet no one wrote a book about the Canadian contribution on D-Day?

So, I get where we’re coming from here. The failed raid on Dieppe was a big deal, which led to an awful lot of Canadians being kept prisoner for years, which is not something that most people learn a lot about in school. So yes—but again, I feel like the “Canadians kept as POWs” aspect was reasonably well covered in Behind Enemy Lines. Am I wrong? Is it because these men were kept for so long—until the liberation of France and invasion of Germany? I don’t know. Let’s recap and find out.

One of the things I did enjoy about this book is how unabashedly not-into-it Alistair is about being a soldier. He is a bookish, shy kid who moves from Scotland to Ontario with his parents and younger sisters, and when his father dies fairly young, his mother has to take over making the money. Alistair’s friend Mackie, who is older and far more athletic, more or less strong-arms Alistair into joining the military in the summer of 1940, and we’re off to the races. Alistair’s mother is devastated, since her husband, Alistair’s father, was gassed very badly in the First World War, and he was never right after that and it probably contributed to his early death. So we’re already not off to a great start.

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I don’t know what I expected here, but even if I had bothered myself to read the back cover I’m not sure it would have helped me. This is a book about a prison camp! Prison camp! And oh my god, so gory. It’s good, don’t worry, but…maybe don’t read this around a mealtime.

I need to stop thinking that the I Am Canada books are all boring, because this was a lot of things, but boring is not on that list. Gripping, yes. Disgusting, yes (in places). Gory, oh my lands, yes. Incredibly sad, yes. But boring, not so much. I mean, you’d probably get more out of this book if you had a passing familiarity with the role Hong Kong played during the Second World War, but hey, even if you don’t, still good!

If you happen to have a 12-year-old boy handy who’s a reluctant reader but easily lured by some gory war stories, this is the book you’ll want to give him. As I mentioned, not a great idea if you have a weak stomach, or you just don’t want to read about lots and lots and lots of violence. And death. And violent death. This is going to be your only warning.

This is one of those books telling one story broken up into two chunks—current, and how we got here. Jack is in a prison camp on Hong Kong Island by January of 1942, and they’re already being starved and forced to go out on work parties and generally miserable. Then we flash back to October of the previous year when Jack is shipping out from his home in Toronto after finishing his basic training. And apparently there’s some bad blood there between him and his girlfriend’s family. I’m sensing a star-crossed-lovers type thing, since his girlfriend Alice is apparently a very sweet girl and Jack beat up her brother at one point. But Alice comes to see him off on the train, but Jack’s brother stops her, and they don’t get to say goodbye to each other after all. This is literally the most cheerful thing that happens in the entire book, so if you want to back out now, this is your warning.

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I thought this book was going to suck and I was proven horribly, amazingly wrong. Is this going to make me less of a snob about these books? It should!

Sink And Destroy: The Battle of the Atlantic, Bill O’Connell, North Atlantic, 1940, Edward Kay, 2014.

I’m the worst. This is the second I Am Canada book I have read, and I thought they were going to be awful, but I’ve been very favourably impressed by both of them. I should get my act together and read the rest of them now! I will, when I get there, it’s just that I’m so horribly bored by most of the topics that it takes me forever to even crack one open. Anyway, this one is great. But full disclosure, I wrote most of this review while watching Das Boot, because it reminded me how much I liked it, and also because I used to love that movie. That was my favourite movie! What was wrong with me? What 20-year-old girl’s favourite movie is Das Boot? This does not say anything good about my psyche, I’m sure.

Another full disclosure: the first good chunk of this book is pretty dull. It does take a while to get going. There’s this whole boring segment where Billy is fishing away, which is how you know some bad shit is going to go down. Whenever there’s an idyllic family fishing scene you just know people are going to die or have something brutal happen. Anyway, Bill is a poor kid from Iroquois, which is right on the St. Lawrence River, who has two older brothers, a younger brother, and a younger sibling. He works on a merchant ship as a teenager, and there’s several boring pages that more or less just recap the war. Invasions, bombings, blah blah blah. Things finally get going when Bill enlists in the navy, much to his parents’ dismay, and we’re finally off!

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I always complain that these books about boys are boring and dull, but this one was not. Probably because it’s a Kathryn Lasky book, so it’s going to be a good bit above the general run, but I was still genuinely surprised! Incidentally, this book was rereleased with a new title and cover, and you tell me which one is more engaging.

So, here you go. The initial title looks exactly like every other single My Name Is America book, which is not super thrilling, but the reissue is…it’s a little bit pulp-fiction-y, isn’t it? I’m not an 11-year-old boy so I’m probably not the target audience here, but am I wrong? The expressions on everyone’s faces here are hilarious—grinding fury, complete irritation, and what looks like the guy in the back who may have just heard the world’s most hilarious joke. I don’t know what’s happening here.

Gus here, our teenage protagonist, is preparing to secretly follow the Lewis and Clark expedition in search of a little adventure, and his brilliant plan is to wait until they’re too far along to tell him he has to go back. As stupid of an idea as that is, and believe me it is truly dumb, it is definitely something a teenage boy would come up with. He’s half French and half Omaha, calls himself a half-breed, and speaks French, Omaha, and English, which as you imagine might come in handy. He immediately begins complaining about how slow the whole expedition is going, which is not surprising considering that they’re a good bit more clunky than a single teenage boy and his knapsack.

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I’ve been deliberately skipping the My Name is America books because I think they’re boring, but here’s one that’s pretty interesting (written by the same guy who wrote Sean Sullivan, which could win awards for being boring).

Why don’t the MNIA books get clever titles? It’s so dull. They relaunched the series in 2012 and did give them titles, which is cool, but this one was not chosen for reissue and hence didn’t get a new title. My copy does have a fold-out section at the back with a cross-section map of an iron mine, which is pretty cool, though. Interestingly, the books across all the series tend to have a strong pro-union bias, which pops up in this book (as we shall see) as well as the newsie diary set in 1899, the Dear America novel Hear My Sorrow about shirtwaist workers, A Coal Miner’s Bride (again with the mining!), and to a lesser extent in Days of Toil and Tears (Dear Canada).

The other thing that tends to be a bit less engaging about the MNIA (and I Am Canada, etc.,) is that they need to be focused on older boys in order to effectively be a part of the story (generally: war, or work, and it’s a real stretch to get an 11-year-old protagonist involved in a war that’s not on the home front). But that is frustrating in itself—the books are targeted at younger boys, but the protagonists are older, which isn’t strange, but it ends up reading as a strange mishmash between the two ages. Eventually I am going to get around to reviewing I Am Canada, which suffers from a lot of the same issues, but in the meantime I will just say that if you’re going to write series about girls where they experience the war at home, you can do that with boys, too. Plenty of young teenage and preteen boys experienced wars and social upheaval at home, without having to go Be In It! That’s a valid plot for a book, too! But the only MNIA that really covers this is one where there’s a kid who’s a witness to the Battle of Fredericksburg, and they already had a journal about a Civil War soldier anyhow.